When the Grand Jury indicted abortion doctor Dr. Kermit Gosnell in 2011, it wrote: “This case is about a doctor who killed babies… What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancyand then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors… Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on … here. But no one put a stop to it.”
Filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer (“FrackNation,” “Not Evil Just Wrong”) have spent the last few years investigating the case and raising money for a feature documentary about the man they call “America’s biggest serial killer.” Now, in “Gosnell,” McElinney and McAleer report their shocking findings, taking readers inside the grisly case the mainstream media hesitated to cover. What really happened in Gosnell’s Pennsylvania clinic? And perhaps more importantly, how did Gosnell get away with infanticide for decades?”
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This book is disturbing but I recommend it anyway. The authors give an account of the disturbing medical practice of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist in Philadelphia who in now in prison after his unethical practices were exposed during a raid on him for writing illegal pain medication prescriptions. At the end of the book, the author actually interview Gosnell in prison.
It is the silence of others, despite the grotesque nature of the crimes committed, that continues to bewilder me as I read this startling book. Thankfully, filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer refused to avert their investigative glare from the inhumane travesty conducted in Philadelphia—the mutilated, mass killing of born-alive infants within the seedy walls of the Women’s Medical Society Clinic by a certain Doctor Kermit Gosnell. This ‘Doctor’ eschewed the Hippocratic oath and human decency. Instead, Kermit Gosnell chose a bleak path nearer to that of Josef ‘The Angel of Death’ Mengele. Mengele did not act alone. His grizzly deeds in Auschwitz were government sanctioned.
Nor did Kermit Gosnell act in isolation. The complicit role activist media, social radicals, medical colleagues, and incompetent (politicized) government played in perpetuating his crimes is an indictment of the moral wasteland we’re becoming. This is not about equating Gosnell’s crime to the horrific actions of Mengele, except to illustrate contemporary society’s refusal to learn from the past. If we did care, these blood-curdling crimes against babies would have ended earlier. If we did care, a caring nation would collectively march in the streets demanding answers. Instead, there’s muted silence and politicized obfuscation.
For me, this telling of the Gosnell nightmare is the first salvo in the fight for our very souls, and a diminishing chance to avoid us being judged barbaric. It is not okay to set aside fundamental moral principles (by either omission or commission) in the pursuit of blindly furthering an ideology. And, it’s never acceptable to contrive distorted truths and false claims (rationalized that it’s ‘for the greater good’) as a justification for the darkest of human behavior.
In that sense, this book provoked in me a reaction well beyond the Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate. It touched the core of what it truly means to be an empathetic, civilized society; and how the reprehensible conduct of some bad actors destroys it for all of us. As such, authors McElhinney and McAleer have my thanks. I regard them as ‘canaries in the coalmine’ alerting us, American society, to the consequences of turning a blind eye to the inhumane deeds of a select few. If we continue to get this wrong and allow enablers to disassemble facts in order to cover up crimes against the feeblest among us, history will judge us all harshly.
“Gosnell” is a tough read, but a civilized society has the responsibility to pursue the truth wherever it may take us. There should be zero tolerance for cover-ups or dubious rationales, no matter where one resides on the ideological spectrum. In that spirit, I recommend “Gosnell” as required reading in all institutions dedicated to social sciences, moral ethics, governance, and medicine.